On April 23, 2005, the founder of YouTube, Jawed Karim, filmed a 20-second video of him talking about elephants. Entitled “Me At The Zoo,” it was the first video ever uploaded to his fledgling site, but that’s not the only reason it’s so popular (11 million hits and counting.) After all, people love to learn, and this video teaches all a very important nature lesson: elephant’s trunks are “really, really, really long.” Professor Karim, you have enlightened us all.

The first webcam

Workers at the University Of Cambridge were sick of walking to the office coffee pot, only to find it empty. So on November 22, 1993, Daniel Gordon and Martyn Johnson took a nearby camera and hooked it up to the Internet, so anyone could log on and see if a coffee trip was in their future. Even people who didn’t work there logged on to watch the Coffee Pot Show, marking the one and only time that anybody has used the Internet for something so absolutely useless.

The first picture ever posted on the Internet

Les Horribles Cernettes was a parody girl group made up of workers at CERN, the European nuclear research company. Prior to a performance on July 18, 1992, they snapped the above picture, which soon became the first-ever picture to be uploaded to the World Wide Web. So, fully-clothed women, and no cats or bacon anywhere … damn, early Internet was WEIRD.

The first animated gif

On June 15, 1987, the very first GIF was created: a picture of an airplane. Sadly, said GIF does not exist anymore, but chances are you know what an airplane looks like, so it’s not a total loss. bac then, GIFs were little more than grainy still pictures. It wasn’t until the early ‘90s that the very first animated GIF came to be. It was a rotating globe, as seen above, though the actual file has long been lost. But again, we’re assuming you know what a globe is when you see one.

The first email

The very first e-mail was sent by Ray Tomlinson in 1971 on the old ARPANET. It’s message simply read “qwertyuiop” which, in case you weren’t sure, is simply the top row of letters on your keyboard. Oh, and Tomlinson sent it to the computer right next to him, simply for a bit of fun. Seriously; he only invented e-mail because “it seemed like a neat idea.” Yes, Mr. Tomlinson. Life-changing revolutionary ideas are, for the most part, neat.

The first Tweet

March 21, 2006, marked the very first Twttr (vowels hadn’t been invented yet), a quick little “inviting coworkers” message sent out by founder Jack Dorsey. There is an earlier tweet that reads “just setting up my twittr,” but it was an automated deal, whereas “inviting coworkers” was the first stab at actually typing something on the new medium. It’s only been retweeted 2400 times, whereas the automated tweet has been retweeted over 15,000 times, proving once and for all that machines are better than us.

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